Idlewhile plays free hometown show at Oskar Blues

By Lisa Siciliano. Longmont-based Idlewhile is performing at Oskar Blues Home Made Liquids & Solids on Sunday.
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LONGMONT -- Giselle Collazo can get obsessive about the artists she loves. Some of the Longmont resident's favorite acts are from here in Boulder County, and she speaks about them with a dreamy passion.

"I call them musical crushes," she said. "I have a dozen musical crushes."

Collazo, a singer whose voice has the sweet, dark flavor of grape jelly, is no doubt herself the object of many musical crushes. Listeners are at a disadvantage when confronted with Collazo, a musical technician who's attuned to minute adjustments that can enchant or deflate a passage and who pays meticulous attention to the way each line comes out.

"I'm really keen on how to deliver a lyric," she said. "I want to kill someone with the delivery of a line."

Collazo performs with the local folk-rock band Idlewhile, which she co-founded with her partner, Steven Phoenix. The six-piece group came together in 2010 and performs regularly at metro area venues. Earlier this year the Idlewhile track "Monkeys" was included on Boulder-based Advenutre Records' "Cuvee 7" compilation, which also featured music by The Yawpers, Megan Burtt and other notable acts from the region.

On Sunday, Idlewhile plays a free hometown show from 6 to 9 p.m. at Oskar Blues Home Made Liquids & Solids.

If there is a quintessentially Coloradan kind of music, it is a style that favors an earthy authenticity and employs traditional instrumentation, especially bluegrass and country strings, but expands on the usual use and swaps an Appalachian conservatism for a Rocky Mountain high. Harmonicas and odd front-porch instruments might be in use. Vocal harmonies are everywhere. "Americana" is the term people reach for to encompass this unwieldy category. Think of Elephant Revival and Paper Bird.

Idlewhile rests somewhere nearby. Harmonies by Collazo and Phoenix, who front the band, are the sweet spots of their music. They have a fiddle player, Miguel Ramos, and an upright bassist, Paul Tedesco, as well as a banjo player, Matt Lawlor, and a mandolinist, Chad Granoff. The same personnel could make a bluegrass band, but instead they wield electric guitars, and Lawlor mainly plays drums. They're richly acoustic on one hand, seductively rock on the other. Idlewhile can be dark, yet it doesn't indulge darkness so much as acknowledge it. Steven wrote a song about a friend who committed suicide and whose body he found. His approach was to make it a "beautiful, upbeat, joyous" creation, as Collazo described it.

Phoenix came up with the name Idlewhile, a nod to one's more peaceful moments. Idlewhile touts the value of setting boundaries in life to "disconnect from the pressures."

Collazo describes herself as "a Puerto Rican kid from the Bronx." Her parents came to the United States in the 1950s, and her grandfather, Heroildo Vera, who played a kind of small guitar called a cuatro, was one of the first musicians to play live on the radio when radio first came to Puerto Rico, Collazo said. Phoenix came from Los Angeles, and he and Collazo met in Colorado.

"We collided in the Rockies" is how he put it.

Now they live together with their sons, one a piece, from previous relationships. They have a studio known as the "electric playroom" in their home. It's equipped with drums, keyboards, guitars, amps, a Leslie speaker, recording gear -- everything you need. They're longtime musical collaborators.

The seed for Idlewhile was planted during the holidays in 2006, when the couple got together with some friends to "eat food, drink and play music" for 10 days. They wrote a bunch of songs, and the whole experience impressed Phoenix.

"We thought, 'Gee whiz, that was fun,'" he said.

In early 2010, Ramos, who was a member of the popular Latin-rhythm band Cabaret Diosa and knew Phoenix and Collazo, approached the couple about doing more with their music.

"That was the real spark, sort of that endorsement from Miguel," Phoenix said.

The band has put out an 11-song CD, "Idlewhile -- Postcard 2011," available on iTunes. On Saturday, the band performs at the Jamestown Mercantile, and its calendar includes upcoming engagements in Nederland, Laporte and other Front Range stops. Phoenix attributes the band's successes so far in part to its practice of good business principles. But it's also due to the product.

"These songs stand on their own," he said. "We're blessed to be the vehicle for these songs."

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